Today

Lovely how some people in the PA community mistake "Uber working with the community" for "the community using Uber to make a game."

Chowder springs to mind.

I'm going to pull that statement out and say this:

The balance between Basic and advanced is completely broken. It has been proven time and time again, and your wonderful balance team continues to insist they have a solution for it - and we keep predicting what will happen when the new changes hit. And they keep happening in almost the same way we predict.

I don't think there is a chance in the world that either Meta or Scathis or Jon will be admitting they are wrong here.

I'll also say this: The only reason the T2 rush isn't the meta this patch is because the commander doesn't have the metal and energy regen he has in the PTE. I've practiced using it. It works insanely well.

I'll make a thread on this soon. I'll lay the whole case out for you. I or another person active in the community will be able to counter every single argument any of you all can come up with for Upgraded T2.

Honesty is never a lose-lose situation.

Instead of over-hyping and saying WE WILL GET THREE DLCS WAHOO you say, Look, we WANT to do three DLCs, but right now we only have the funding for one. We'll do what we can, but no promises.

It's the same here. In fact, it is nigh on parallel.
If you fear change, you stagnate as an organization and slowly wither away.
In fact, that's one of the basic tenets of a good leader: He welcomes change, instead of fearing it. Life happens, Scathis. Be honest about it up-front and we will understand. We want to help you and make your job easier - help us so we can do that.

We did say we want to do three DLCs. That translates to "CONFIRMED 3 DLCS".
You and everyone here knows it does.

Fine. I'll be honest and upfront.
Making a game is hard. If you haven't done it, don't assume you know how. Things look easy from the outside.
Go make a game, it's fun, but hard.

I am not afraid of change and we don't stagnate. We take so much flak for 'not supporting game X' because we have changed. And no, people did not understand it. Even after we're upfront. If you don't believe me, go look at the Super MNC forums.

When you bring up an issue that "has been proven time and time again", there is a whole separate set of people who don't agree with you but are quiet until their pet balance decision, feature, bug has been altered. Then they come out the same way.

All we can do is rely on the decades of experience we have and the massive amounts of data we've accumulated over the years to make our decisions. What we can't do is hold a 'million cooks in the kitchen' democracy debate about every single feature with everyone on our forums. That doesn't make for a good game, good production planning, or just plain common sense.

We're going to ship Planetary Annihilation. And when we ship 1.0 we will have an awesome (and I know awesome), fun, entertaining game that many people will enjoy playing. A video game we're very proud of. Then, as long as money permits, we will continue to add even more amazing features.

Players will smash asteroids into planets.
Players will cover planets in nuclear missiles.
Thousands of players will do something in our game they've never done in an RTS before. Ever.
Then, they'll Chrono Cam back and watch it all again and again.

That's what we're delivering, an experience like no other in the gaming world. Supported by awesome fans through Kickstarter. Engaged with all you forum goers throughout the entire process.

I feel like we're doing something special here on all these fronts. Something the vast majority of game developers don't ever do.

I am Scathis and I work at UBER ENTERTAINMENT and I'm proud of it.

Finally. The real Scathis. That took a while.

This game already is awesome by my conceivably low standard, John. And believe me, I can come close to understanding how hard game design is. Frustration and stress over the community, the game, people in general, and bad coffee can really get to folks. I've made multiple websites - every one was a challenge and caused stress. I've had to put one on hold for a while because it's just too much, in addition to the other things going on in my life right now. I try to overstate how much stress ya'll are under because I know I can't fully understand what's really going on and how hard it really is for ya'll.

Look - I can't pretend to have more knowledge on this subject than you do. After all, this is the first RTS game I've invested serious time and effort into.

I'll address the issues with balance in another thread...so I'll leave that one alone

I'm not asking for a town hall meeting about every little balance change. After all, the only things the community has really been up in arms about have been the big, generic things - for example:

Ignoring the exclusive promises made to Kickstarter backers.
Going back on the statement that all units shall be viable at all points during the game.
No Ladder for 1.0.

When you say taking flak, Scathis, are you just reading each post like every person has the same level of merit, or are you profiling by a) common sense and b) people who you know have experience? Because a lot of the decisions about change you guys make will get some negative posts from the majority of the community, but not the guys like myself, KNight, Nanolathe, brianpurkiss, etc etc. When we all start agreeing on something being a bad decision for the game (we usually don't all agree on anything LOL), I would think that would mean something significant about your decision. That was the purpose of the Vanguards, I thought originally - to be the most trusted and experience players from the community who would be given the privilege of having uber's ear if a balance issue came up. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

I appreciate everything you've done and will do for this game, John. That goes for all of you, Uber.

I wonder how much time Uber spends addressing the criticism that they don't spend much time talking to the community. If they could stop getting dragged into those big internet dramas, just imagine how much effort they could afford to put into status updates.

Whoa. Hold on. Wait one god damned second.

We have fantastic coffee and I won't stand for such blasphemy.

I was only speaking of the OCCASIONAL MISHAP.

I'M SO SORRY

I expect with how much coffee that has been consumed of late you guys have installed your own coffee farm, processing plant and roaster on site.

I feel the need to quote this somewhere.

EDIT: Twitter seemed appropriate.

The funny thing is that many feel the more updates would actually cancel out much of the drama and the discussions would, I feel, be a whole lot more reasonable. The Able and Delta/Invictus scenarios would have been discussed much more calmly had Uber come to us upfront and explained the situation.

Mike

Eh people would still find things to argue and drama about. Even if it might have made the forum uproar a bit less for those specific instances, there still would have been everything else for the forums to argue about.

I'll address some of these quickly:

1. With the exception of the Delta (Which, as you'll recall, we've already said we'll provide another commander, but we haven't been able to get to it yet), the only other example of this is Able gamers. This is the kind of argument that gets very old, very quickly. We have tried to go above and beyond in honoring and respecting our backers. Even so, it is possible to not guess how people will react to a well meaning gesture. The Delta was a simply a confluence of plans changing over a long period of time, and suddenly, Invictus being a core part of the game, and us needing to suddenly rethink "is delta exclusive enough".. Delta was also not a backer promise. It was something we did for the unveil of the Cosmic Limited edition, that was promised to $90+ backers long after the fact.
2. Let's be clear here: I am the only one who's made any specific statements about this, and frankly, it was me being a little too literal in Jon's comments about "Do what TA did". And even then, my comments on this subject have ALWAYS been hedged with "As much as possible". At the end of the day, designing a good game trumps an sticking to exactly what another game did.
3. We have talked about this extensively internally. It's not that we think it's not important. We know it is. But we also think at launch is not necessarily the most important time to do it, given all the other things we have to do. Having a solid, polished game that people are playing actively, with a fast follow up some of these competitive features, rather than have some other features and polish suffer for it. And it is an either/or, not a both. We have strong, well researched reasons for targeting the date we are for 1.0. So we feel it is the right decision to do ladders and some other competitive features after launch. We might be wrong. But we have spent a lot of time discussing the pros and cons, and we think it's the right decision to postpone these features in favor of more polish, bug fixing and performance work.

The problem with discussions like this, when you start using "when we all start...", "we all" is a very limited subset of the community. It is just the people who enjoy interacting on the forums, which is less than 1% of our entire community. Just please keep that in mind when you speak for the entire PA playing community. A much more accurate statement is "A lot of us on the forums/our clan/etc". That's not to say the feedback on the forums is pointless - it absolutely is not. But we still have to take it with a grain of salt and weigh it against what we're actually seeing across all players, not just our highly engaged community on our forums.

(This post is not intended to be antagonistic - trying to dissect and hopefully improve understanding on a complex series of issues)

IMHO, and I know for a fact that I'm not the only one who has this opinion, the game won't ever reach its potential as long as all units are not viable throughout the game.

If you mentioned what these reasons were we'd be more inclined to trust this decision to be the correct one.

I would never take your posts as antagonistic, Marc. I think I can tell the difference. You presented a factual argument. I like factual arguments

1. I didn't like the way ya'll manipulated the Delta, but in the end, it made sense to me. The part I didn't like was that it gives the appearance of misconduct in this regard - just as walking out of a bank with a mask in hand. Especially if it's a joker mask.
2. Yeah, that's the reason I've heard from a lot of people, not just you. But i think the issue here might be that there were no specific design guidelines set in stone - when you make a balance change, most of us scramble around, changing and double-checking our premises of what you guys are thinking. Others, like Nanolathe and MadSci, have given up on the whole idea of trusting Scathis with the UberBalance. It's confusing. An analogy would be akin to a hamster wheel: Sure, you guys have some great running muscles built up from all that experience, but where exactly are we going, again?
3. I believe you. I think I might be able to accurately guess the reasons and researched consequences. I still think none of it is valid because I am of the opinion that an in-game ladder is crucial to growing and nurturing the community and backers from R-Day on forward. You have made the decision that the cost of this does not justify the benefit - most likely, that you would get more players on-board by releasing in late August than you would retain by releasing in late November with a ladder and more cool features.

I think you're vastly underestimating the community here, like I said there are always people who want to stir up that type of drama for whatever reason, but there are far more people who would approach such topics much more calmly when approached about it beforehand or even just not having it sprung on them.

Mike

Which is what I've been trying to say all along, but I keep getting distracted. Darn squirrels.

To expand on it, yes, the community can be very reaction-y on a variety of topics, but the catch is that in general I feel like the community reacts less so strictly to change in a general sense and more so to the method or the presentation of the change.

Yeah, if Uber has said up front Able Gamers approached them and they wanted to use the Progenitor as a base for a re-skin for that there would have been people that did not like the idea of it being an exclusive commander. The difference is that the tone of that discussion would have been much better that what ended up happening I feel.

Mike

I've been busy. I have a few games on my plate.

This is the one statement I'll comment on.
I don't honestly know who said this. I know it wasn't me. I said on a stream that we may have units that are better than other units and that's ok.

There are many ways to balance a game and have it still be balanced. I prefer to have the power increase as a game goes on. It ends games in crescendos instead of limping to the finish. Power increases are always "upping the stakes" as the game progresses. I don't like the T2 just being different but not stronger. It makes for a boring game. That's my opinion and I'm the one doing the balance.
It is a good balance. It will never be perfect. It might not be the balance you want but just ask Brian Purkiss and I'm sure he can recommend a balance mod for you.

The "all units viable throught the entire game" is something that's been tried on every single one of the 8 RTS games I've been a part of. But I can't name one where every unit is viable the entire game. And yes, I'm sure someone will say "You know nothing, game X has every unit viable!" It's not a binary thing, some people will think they are viable, others will not. The truth lies somewhere in between.
You can maybe say that of Command and Conquer games, but that's because the difference between early and late game is like four minutes.

Also, I know that the T2 rush is stronger in PTE. It's because we were thinking about simulating the 'egg' by giving the commander more initial resources. We are considering our options. It feels good to not have the first 2 minutes of the game staring at your commander build stuff. But the tech rush is stronger. We will figure it out.

Some people already figured it out, might want to ask them how they did it ;p

Mike